I want to create characters not that people aspire to be like but whom people see themselves in who end up doing things they already aspire to do but won’t, for whatever reason. Probably this penchant for fictional violence against wealth hoarders will get me into trouble eventually. Until then, however, I will continue to write about working class robots in sewers trying to shoot the evil meat above.
The internet promises democracy but delivers reactionary politics (and is designed to do so). It promises expression and valorization of the subject, but delivers, more often, dopamine denial and depression. Meanwhile the analog, at least in the arts, promises authenticity, but fails to deliver much more than rarefied bourgeois spaces, out of touch with the vast majority of the human race — as Amiri Baraka would say, “fingerprints of rich painters”... Or, empty art museum spectacles; Epcot Center immersion for the cosmopolitan bourgeois and petit-bourgeois.
FOR SOME reason, impenetrable to any German leftist, there seems to be the strange US-American liberal assumption that Germany is a lederhosen-wearing, beer-sipping liberal paradise, where we hug refugees all the day, care for mother nature, and organize a perfect ‘socialist’ (in the liberal use of the term, meaning social-democratic) society, and with the guidance of a dear and democratic government, we care for our people and the world. While it will forever be a mystery for me how anyone could believe this in the first place, I am going to debunk this assumption in this article. My wager is that, by observing the current situation in Germany, we might find tendencies and latencies that elide developments within capitalist realism that are elsewhere still not fully feasible.
BCDT reminds the screen reader they aren’t reading paper. It reminds the print reader they are reading paper. It reminds the print reader they aren’t reading a screen. It reminds the digital reader they are reading on a dream stealing machine. It reminds those holding the physical design of ephemerality.
The dominant UFO visitation myths echo popular occultism in capitalism. The individual is abducted or visited -- in a secular-but-not-secular epiphany -- enweirding their life with either trauma or good fortune, or both; even if the good and bad fortune is a mere valorization of the formerly discarded individual within a cruel social totality. This is the ufology of “normal’’ bourgeois capitalism; the kismet of the UFO encounter.
A single mother is driving past an abandoned factory on her way home from a low paying job. She is hungry. Above the factory a billboard floats in the sky advertising a succulent feast. But it does not strike her — or us — that this is odd, that her hunger has manifested itself above the factory ruin in an image of unavailable food. When we step outside ideology we see this absurdism for what it is.
Edward Bond died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history.